The increased usage of the internet and ICT has posed a significant challenge to protect copyrighted content due to advanced image forgery techniques that make image authentication extremely difficult. The aim of this paper is to establish a binary classification method for determining copyright images from copyright-free ones. A deep hashing model is introduced for an image authentication system, which uses deep learning-based perceptual hashing. Hash codes from a deep hashing model trained with a copyright image dataset are used to identify images. The deep learning model is able to learn features that represent the implicit meaning or structural information of an image. The copyright dataset, which lacks class labels, is trained with deep hashing models with self-supervision. The proposed model is based on an autoencoder or variational autoencoder model and is improved by including convolutional filters, residual blocks, and vision transformer blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed model performs a one-to-one mapping with most stored images and can retrieve related images using image features in hash collisions. The model can find the query image among the top 5 images with comparable hash codes. The results indicate that the proposed deep hashing approach is robust and applicable.

Deep hashing, autoencoder, copyright image, data augmentation, self-supervision